Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Open Source Hardware Bank has a website...

By comparison to Justin's post below, I might argue that nothing's official these days until it has it's own website set up, and a social networking site that automatically twitters people messages when there accounts are visited or people refresh the login page :-) Anyway, this post is a bit of a laundry list right now, but I'm posting it up anyway since if I had just bought something from the bank, I'd be thinking, ok bank, that's nice, blablabla open source blablabla where's my stuff and when does it ship?

I'm definitely going to need a better way to "announce" this, or maybe I'll put up the date on the bank website? The parts should all arrive in about 2 weeks, and then it'll be a week or so of assembly after that.

I spent some time today thinking about how I might be able to automate the queue system on a more regular basis, since I think it would be tough to run a "bank" from a blog. So I threw up a little website over here. The idea is, every night, when I get home from work, I'll run a little script which will download and parse the data, and then kick out images, and copy them up to the web server. I'm also meeting with Karim in Boston soon, to talk about some metrics and analytics the bank should publicly report, for instance:

How much is in the reserve as cash, vs. tied in inventory

A ratio for the number of build's refunded / rebought over time

A "GDP" figure, for total amount bought and sold weekly (daily?) of stuff the bank funded

The average floating rate of return for the bank based on it's funded doubled inventory

I'm still thinking of other measures, but if you have any ideas, please let me know...

Right now, the website it awfully lonely with just the Illuminato. But that's not going to last long, given the massive amount of emails I've gotten over the last few days. I had no idea! It's like waking up one day, and finding out you really aren't the only one who thought that 13th Floor was such a cooler movie than the Matrix (I mean seriously, same concept, much more subtle delivery, and more thought provoking if you ask me). So I'm definitely not alone in thinking Open Source Hardware finance needed some help.

Anyway, here are just a few ideas that I've seen run through my emails - some hardware, and some bank-related:

ExtenderShields and Protoshields for the Illuminato (ok, secretly I've gotten about 2 emails as week asking for this too, so it makes logical sense I suppose)

A 6-layer pcb professionally designed camera- wow! Seriously, I thought I knew how to build circuit boards, and then Tim sent me a 6 layer board! Not worthy, but certainly motivating. I keep getting to a point where I think "cool, I can do that or I could build that" and someone comes along and totally schools me. Kind of reminds me of scanning Mark's C code the first time. Anyway, I now know the next tier I want to break through...

Rick sent me a link to the Amazon Kindle, and said, "I'll help you build this cheaper". Actually, after the whole Esquire magazine cover event, I called up almost every thin flexible OLED company I could find, and they all told me to get lost, or register for their preferred vendor program (what does that even mean?), or buy 10-50,000.

I got 4.5 emails about medical devices (wow, pharma must really not be doing well, with so many loose end projects floating around with no one to claim!) I think maybe I'll start my own healthcare system too while I'm at it (just kidding).

My three favorite quotes:

Paul: "I love the fact that while the whole world is melting down and everyone hates bankers, you're starting a new bank."